I formed many new friendships in UBC’s Faculty of Education. The students were a spirited and diverse bunch, and with much of the instruction based on interactive classroom training, we had plenty of opportunity to learn from each other.
That first year in Vancouver passed quickly. During the week, I worked hard toward securing my education degree in the city, then escaped to Whistler on weekends. Almost before I knew it I had graduated and was substitute teaching in Coquitlam. By then I had moved into a larger apartment with my UBC classmate Chris Ingvaldson and his wife. Chris introduced me to the headmaster of West Point Grey Academy, and soon after I was offered a full-time teaching position there. (Chris would also become a teacher at the school.) West Point Grey, a private co-ed school founded just two years earlier, was a good posting for a newly minted teacher. The staff was young and energetic, and it was great to be a part of building a new school’s culture.
Over ten years later, long after I moved back east and entered political life, I got a late-night phone call with shocking news: Chris had been arrested on a charge of possession of child pornography. Eventually he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three months in jail. Like everyone else who knew Chris at teachers’ college and in subsequent teaching jobs, I was utterly shocked. Chris lost his teaching job, his marriage, and most of his friendships, including mine.
Whenever the media announce that someone is facing charges involving child pornography or similar offences, they often feature interviews with neighbours and colleagues who say that the defendant gave no clue about his sexual predilections. Like many people, I had always been somewhat skeptical of those testimonials. I assumed that you should somehow know when you were in the company of someone with such tendencies. After the episode with Chris, I realized that isn’t true. It also explained why police officers and prosecutors need to work so hard to protect our children from this kind of exploitation. Neither Chris’s wife nor I as his roommate ever envisaged the dark path he would lead himself down. It was a bitter lesson for me, and one that needs sharing.
I spent two and a half years at West Point Grey Academy, teaching mostly French and math, but from time to time other subjects like drama, creative writing, and a Grade 12 law class.
In each of my classes, I tried to avoid that “sage on the stage” method I had experienced at Brébeuf by inserting collaborative intellectual exercises into my lessons. These included math puzzles and brainteasers, which have always been something of an obsession for me. Here’s an example I remember discovering during my early days in Vancouver: the well-known (among mathematicians) “7-Eleven problem.” It’s based on a customer entering a convenience store, choosing four items, and watching as the clerk totals the amount owed on a pocket calculator. When the clerk announces that the amount is $7.11, the customer points out that the clerk hadn’t added the prices but had multiplied them. Apologizing, the clerk is careful to add the prices this time, hits the Total key—and is amazed to discover that the total is still $7.11. The challenge is to determine what the exact prices of those four items must be to produce $7.11 when both added and multiplied. Solving the puzzle isn’t child’s play, and if math puzzles are not your thing you probably couldn’t care less. But if this kind of brainteaser appeals to you, you could find yourself devoting days to finding its solution. As I did.
Here’s my point: if I could find ways to engage my students in tackling their lessons the way that the 7-Eleven puzzle engaged me, it would surely generate the light-bulb responses that I had loved to see during the snowboarding lessons.
Some of the techniques I used were simple yet effective. For example, when teaching math I would start a class by asking why our numbering system is based on 10. Why not a base of 8, for example? Or a base 6 or some other number? Virtually every culture in the world has based their numbering system on 10. “Why is that?” I would say, then ask everyone to raise their hands and look around. One by one the students would realize that their outstretched hands with their ten fingers weren’t signalling that they knew the answer—they were the answer.
Puzzles worked especially well in algebra. I would tell my class that a father and his daughter go fishing, and when they are about to return home, the father asks his daughter to give him one of the fish she caught. “Then we’ll have the same number,” he explains. The daughter responds that if her father gave her a fish, she would have twice as many as he had. So how many fish had each caught?
The solution can be found via two simple algebraic equations with two variables. Of course, there are more intuitive ways of solving it, and the kids who found the solution in the shortest time weren’t always the math whizzes. The point was to engage them, to lead them to the “Aha!” moment when the light bulb came on and made their faces glow.
I tried to take the same approach when teaching English. To show the students the rhythms of poetry, I would write “toobie hornet toobie” on the blackboard and see who could flip the accented syllables to declaim a line from Hamlet. There was a little bit of my old history teacher André Champagne in my approach. Like him, I wanted students to think about things they took for granted, such as the way we count and the way we pronounce simple words. My goal was not just to teach students a certain body of material but to also give them the critical-thinking skills they would need to work problems out on their own throughout their lives.
My often unorthodox approach puzzled school administrators a little, but it made me popular with many of the students. They knew I was a sucker for a good debate, and they would sometimes lure me away from drilling the core curriculum into their minds by engaging me in some tangential philosophical discussion. This led to the odd difficulty. When I needed to apply discipline to my students, they would sometimes interpret it as some sort of a betrayal on my part, thinking that I had turned on them.
My response was always, “I like and respect you, which is why I have high expectations of you. If you don’t do the homework or if you flunk a test, there are going to be consequences. You need to know this. You need to be aware of the expectations you’ll have to meet in life. I wouldn’t be much good if I didn’t help you deal with these realities by holding you to account for what you do.”
Whenever I speak to people who don’t work in the education system, many assume that it is easier to be a teacher in a well-funded private school than in the public system. There is some truth to that. Private schools may have newer and better amenities, and discipline tends to be more effective. But there are trade-offs, especially when it comes to working with parents to get the best out of their children. After paying thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, the parents of private school students may become upset if they fail to see results (that is, high grades). And teachers may censor themselves in parent-teacher interviews, concerned that an angry parent may choose to complain to the administration or threaten to send his or her child to another school. I always preferred to speak the truth to parents. If I thought a child’s school performance was suffering because of his or her home environment, I would say so. Which now and then ruffled some feathers.
Sometimes my teaching methods put me at odds with the conservative West Point Grey administrators. The most significant event concerned a student I’ll call Wayne, who regularly defied the school’s dress code by wearing his tie loose and dangling a chain from his belt. He was a smart, confident kid who chose to adopt a rebel pose. One day, after receiving the umpteenth dressing-down about his attire, Wayne said to me, “It’s not fair. I’m always being called out for my appearance, but the same rules say that the girls’ kilts are supposed to be no more than an inch above their knee. They flout that rule and get away with it. It’s a double standard.”
I was in charge of the in-house student newspaper, a task I undertook with the clear intention to turn it into something kids actually wanted to read, not just a glossy feel-good pamphlet for proud parents. I suggested to Wayne that he write an articl
e on the unfair double standard he had grumbled about. He did, and his article reasonably theorized that perhaps the predominantly male teachers felt uncomfortable pointing out to teenaged female students that their skirts were way too short. It was the sort of thing that everyone knew but no one admitted, until Wayne mentioned it.
When Wayne’s article appeared in the school paper, the administration didn’t react as well as they could have, in my opinion. They not only disciplined Wayne for lacking respect but also discontinued the student newspaper, which convinced me that West Point Grey was not the best fit for me as a teacher, nor I for them. Shortly after, I took a teaching position in the Vancouver public school system.
I want to emphasize, however, that overall I loved my time at West Point Grey. The students and teachers were bright and engaging, and the great things about the school vastly outnumbered its challenges, even in the early years. It also makes me really happy to see that by all accounts West Point Grey Academy continues to stand out as one of the top schools in B.C.
My experience had revealed negative aspects of private education that I had not observed during my own schooling. At Brébeuf, admission had been based largely on an applicant’s performance in a standardized admission test. At West Point Grey, as at many Canadian private schools, the biggest barrier to entry wasn’t the student’s ability but the tuition. While there was some access to scholarships and bursaries, many of the students lived privileged lives, with tennis camps to go to in summer, trust funds to draw upon, trips to Europe to enjoy. None of this on its own made the students difficult to deal with; I met plenty of great kids at West Point Grey. But I worried about the level of materialism being displayed. I would overhear some of them discussing what they would do if they won a lottery, something I found bizarre given that they were hardly children from economically deprived environments. The lottery winnings they dreamed about were always $10 million or $20 million, never $1 million, and the kids would fantasize about spending it on exotic boats and private jets.
Whenever I discuss the problem of income inequality in our society, I think about the children and their families I met when teaching at that school. The parents I encountered at parent-teacher nights were successful, hard-working people, but their wealth gave some of them an excessive sense of entitlement. And many of the students had little exposure to or understanding of the larger society around them and the challenges faced by ordinary people.
I knew many wealthy kids when I was growing up, and I had plenty of advantages myself, including the opportunity to travel with my father. But Dad never spoke of wealth as being the ultimate goal in life. Not once. He would have been appalled to hear me rhapsodize about owning jets and living on Caribbean islands. When he was once asked what values he wanted to pass on to his children, my father replied, “I would want them not to be slaves to material goods. I would want them to appreciate a good meal, a good book, and enjoy holidays. That’s fine. But being miserable if one is deprived of material-based pleasures, I consider that a form of slavery.” Suffice to say, he was successful in passing along those values to his sons.
The public school system was not entirely free of the kind of thinking that disturbed my father. At Vancouver’s Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School, where I taught after West Point Grey, the students tended to come from much less wealthy families, but many of them also seemed caught up with their own materialistic fixations.
At Sir Winston Churchill I overheard one student tell another, “My dad got a new job, so he just bought a Mercedes.” He was excited and proud and wanted to share his elation.
“Let’s have a chat about this,” I said. “A nice new car sure feels great. But at the end of the day, remember that it’s just a car, a way to get from point A to point B.” Then I added: “And sometimes a promotion like your father received comes with lifestyle sacrifices. He may have more responsibility, but he may also have more stress too. You might find your dad is going to be a little bit more worried about work. He might need to work harder and for longer hours. You get a nicer car in the driveway, but less time with your dad. There are always trade-offs in life. You just need to think fully about what’s truly worth dreaming about.”
I have given variations on that speech about quality of life to dozens of kids, and I like to think that I got through to at least a few of them.
The most memorable and powerful moment of my teaching career occurred on September 11, 2001. I woke at six o’clock that morning to the sound of my roommates knocking on my bedroom door. “Turn on the TV!” they called to me, and I tuned in just as the second plane struck the towers. I dressed and went to school, knowing that every student in class that day would have seen the same images I had just witnessed.
“Obviously, we’re not going to be talking about French grammar today,” I said to my Grade 9 and 10 students. “Let’s talk about what happened a few hours ago.”
One student asked, “Does this mean World War Three?” Since the leading theory was that the United States had been attacked by Islamist terrorists, this was a logical question. Other students said they didn’t think the events in New York had much to do with Canada, and one asked, “How will this really change our lives?” just as an aircraft flew low overhead in a way that we had never heard before. It was obviously a military plane, and the class became ominously silent. “That fear instinct you just experienced, that’s what’s new,” I said. We talked about terrorism and the need to fight it, along with the need to ensure that vigilance didn’t become a form of paranoia directed at all Muslims. The kids were all shaken by the events, and as a teaching staff we did our best to both address it and draw them back into the routine of everyday life. It was a challenging time.
Later that day, I got a call from Gerry Butts, who had been in California with his wife, Jodi, and was trying to return to Canada. American airspace was closed to civilian air traffic, so Gerry and Jodi rented a car to drive north. They had to drop it off at the town closest to the border and cab it to the crossing, where I would pick them up.
When I arrived at the Peace Arch, I encountered an absolute mob scene, with cars backed up for hours on the U.S. side of the border. Gerry and Jodi just walked along the highway with their suitcases and astonishingly strolled across the border to my car. After I welcomed them, Gerry said, “Uh, shouldn’t we check in with a customs official?” We left the car and wandered around the facility until we found someone able to process pedestrian travellers, which he did in a matter of seconds. As we drove away, I glanced at the long line of cars in the rear-view mirror and thought of all the families with kids in the back seat, waiting for hours or even days, while my friends had been able to cross the border as if it did not exist. The incident symbolized the disorganized and ad hoc nature of the immediate security response to 9/11.
Vancouver is a beautiful place, as far removed from the world’s violent hotspots as anywhere on earth. There—as in most of Canada—it’s easy to feel both protected and detached. I recognized that in the new era launched by 9/11, no place on earth stood immune from the threats facing our world. Since that day many nations, including Canada, have scored successes against al-Qaeda and like-minded groups. But the threats remain, which is why I urged my students never to forget where they were when they heard the grim news on September 11, 2001. Our memories of that tragedy, painful as they may be, are our best means of ensuring that we remain vigilant in the fight against terrorism.
Chapter Four
The Woods Are Lovely,
Dark, and Deep
In November 1998, I spent a week as a substitute teacher at Pinetree Secondary School in Coquitlam, about a half-hour’s drive east of Vancouver. The class had been a good group of kids, and by week’s end I was sorry to leave them. After saying my goodbyes on Friday the thirteenth, I drove back to my apartment, had dinner, and went to bed. I fell to sleep unaware that earlier that day, I had lost my little brother Michel.
My
telephone rang at five the next morning. It was my mother calling to say there had been an accident, and I knew from the tone of her voice that it involved one of my brothers. I discovered that the cliché phrases were all based in reality: I went numb, my heart sank, and my blood ran cold all at the same time. “We don’t know for sure, because they still haven’t found him,” my mother said. “But the RCMP just told us that Michel was caught in an avalanche up at Kokanee.”
Michel had been doing what he loved most when he died, backcountry skiing with friends in the Southern Interior of British Columbia. While I had been standing at a blackboard, an avalanche had swept my brother and one of his buddies into Kokanee Lake. They had been traversing the steep incline above the lake. His pal Andy managed to swim to shore, but Michel was just too far out. It had taken his other friends hours to dig themselves out and contact the RCMP. Meanwhile, I had had a normal day, as had the rest of my family back east, as yet blissfully unaware of what had happened.
Part of me was certain that Michel was still alive. I just couldn’t conceive of a world in which he wasn’t.
I felt a spasm of guilt. What was Michel doing out on that glacier? Why hadn’t I, as his older brother, found some way to protect him? We lived in the same province. I should have visited him more, called him more, watched over him more, done something to keep him from danger.
It had already been a trying year for Miche. While he was driving home through Manitoba in the spring, a careless driver caused an accident that totalled his truck. He escaped serious injury and was most concerned about his dog, Makwa, who had run off from the accident; it took a week to find him. Compounding his hassles, when the police arrived at the accident scene they found some marijuana in the glove compartment, for which he was charged. But perhaps because of that near-death experience, Michel devoted much of the summer to reconnecting with the family, rebuilding the loving relationships that we had all let drift because of geography and busyness.
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